It would be an interesting exercise in the middle of the Corona crisis if one media outlet carried nothing at all about the Coronavirus. Absolutely nothing.
What would fill their bulletins?
Other ‘normal’ news must be happening as it does on any given day, but with the media shaping the news agenda and deciding what makes the cut with pretty much nothing but Corona, normal news gets overshadowed and simply falls off the edge and as news reporting goes, doesn’t really happen.
It’s a bit like the ancient philosophical question: “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound”?
In the case of the news: “if something newsy happens and no one bothers to report it, was it news”? Did it actually happen”?
I’m not suggesting that the Corona crisis is not news but if nothing else, when news is framed in the context of the tree in the forest, it goes to demonstrate that the news is what the media says it is.
Even if it isn’t.
A further multiplicity of examples of news being considered unworthy of reporting is when it doesn’t suit the story line or narrative or the political predisposition of the media outlet(s).
In other words, the media outlet will tell you ‘A’ story not ‘THE’ story.
This has been best demonstrated over the last three years with the various hoaxes fashioned, forged and fitted up on Donald Trump as a candidate, through the transition period before his inauguration and the first 3 years of the presidency proper, with Spy-gate, Russian collusion and the Ukraine hoax.
As is now universally known and understood all three of these were frauds and hoaxes conjured out of whole cloth and perpetrated on the public by a collusion between the drive by, mainstream media and the Democrats.
From alternative sources and following a trail of evidence breadcrumbs, many people understood this from the very early days, however a cabal of the mainstream media decided that the counterfactual evidence didn’t fit their agenda and therefore ignored the evidence, thereby misleading their readership and audience with misinformation.
That is, to their audience it didn’t happen.
Of course every fraud, to be successful, must have a willing victim to participate and who desperately wants the fraud to be true. They must be willing to be duped and remain incurious and quite happy with what they’re being told and quite comfortable to continue being hoaxed so as to perpetuate their delusion, rage and in this case their Trump derangement syndrome.
Standby for the Coronavirus collusion, conspiracy hoax, inquiry and attempted impeachment currently being framed by the same people, on the basis of what I suspect will become known, as ‘timeline politics’ (ie) what did Trump know and when did he know it?
That will be the next big thing.
The point here that the recent concept of ‘click-bait’ isn’t a new phenomenon.
An old fashioned newspaper billboard outside a news agency is a form of click bait designed to get you to walk-in and buy a newspaper and maybe something else. It’s just that technology has changed and therefore so has the terminology.
The point is to underline that the media determines what is and isn’t news or newsworthy on any given day and what angles to pursue to keep the story alive and their audience alert, alarmed, awake and enraged.
If they ignore a story, to their audience or readership at least, that story simply didn’t happen or was so trivial, not worth covering and it falls to the consumer, if interested to ferret out different sources to get closer to the truth.
And further, it will cease being news when the media deems it is no longer news, they run out of angles or the media themselves are humiliated and buried in overwhelming evidence that totally refutes their narrative.
IMAGE— An analogue form of click-bait. Instead of clicking on, you walk in.